Stage 2 Management Systems | Building A Foundation For Flexible Service Delivery

The presentation will discuss the building of a management system for the services and application layer of a cloud-application infrastructure. It will focus on the three key components in open source cloud-computing that don’t come in the box:

Self-healing application infrastructure

Dynamic auto-scaling

Automated guest administration

Background Details

The RAAS-AML (Redundant Array of Application Servers – Application Management Layer) is a culmination of auto-scaling, self-healing, and service management. My challenge was to create a system that could automate the entire application infrastructure for our SaaS web services delivery system called Expression.

When I started it was a traditional farm of web silos. CloudStack was chosen as the infrastructure foundation, LAMP was manipulated into clusters for the application servers, and RAAS-AML was created to be the systems administrator, which we will focus on.

We used entirely OSS products to complete our challenge, including Flask for API wrapping, and Apache CloudStack API for auto-scaling and guest health, NGINX for load-balancers, CRM for HA, and Python for writing the logic and healing engine.

This presentation will go over the architecture and decisions behind our system, challenges we faced, and how building the RAAS-AML has impacted our business.